Parker J. Palmer: "The God of Reality"
The God I know does not ask us to conform to some abstract norm for the ideal self. God asks us only to honor our created nature, which means our limits as well as potentials. When we fail to do so, reality happens----God happens----and way closes behind us.
The God I was told about in church, and still hear about from time to time, runs about like an anxious schoolmaster measuring people’s behavior with a moral yardstick. But the God I know is the source of reality rather than morality, the source of what is rather than what ought to be. This does not mean God has nothing to do with morality: morality and its consequences are built into the God-given structure of reality itself.
“For a good man to realize that it is better to be whole than to be good is to enter on a strait and narrow path compared to which his previous rectitude was a flowery path.” ----John Middleton Murray
One dwells with God by being faithful to one’s nature.
If we are to live our lives fully and well, we must learn to embrace the opposites, to live in a creative tension between our limits and our potentials. We must take the no of the way that closes and find the guidance it has to offer----- and take the yes of the way that opens and respond with the yes of our lives.
“The glory of God is man fully alive”
------St. Iranaeus
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